Last week , he was skewered for his blatant hypocrisy regarding his ponderous carbon footprint.

This week , The IPPC( left wing and pro AG for sure) made a mockery of some of the THE SEA LEVELS ARE RISING THE SEAL LEVELS ARE RISING" claims made by Jowls in his quackumentary " An Inconvenient Truth" < how's that title for irony-snicker> .

Remember the headlines last summer, spurred by the release of Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, warning that massive amounts of Antarctica's ice sheets are melting, threatening to raise sea levels 20 feet worldwide and wipe out Antarctica's Emperor penguins and polar bears? And alarming reports that Greenland's glaciers are shrinking so rapidly that a third of Florida and the lower part of Manhattan could be swept away within the next 200 years?
As it turns out, The long awaited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report summary released early in February threw some badly needed cold water on that over-heated hype. According to the IPCC, based on the work of 2,500 scientists around the globe, Antarctica's ice sheets will "remain too cold for widespread surface melting," and "is expected to gain in mass due to increased snowfall."

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The report summary also says there is no scientific consensus that Greenland's ice caps are melting enough to contribute to increased sea levels.2And while the writers do acknowledge unknowns, including some observed variability and local changes in glaciers in the polar regions that could contribute to future increased sea levels, it states that overall "there is no consensus on their magnitude."[/FONT]

So because, whilst wildly grabbing at anything we possibly can that smells like it MIGHT just MAYBE lend some shred of scientific support (in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary) to the Republican agenda of raping the environment while greasing the palms of their corporate masters-- this means that we should not try to take any precautions at all and maybe Florida will exist in a hundred years and maybe it won't... ::shrug:: nothing to worry about! The next time 300 trained traffic engineers tell you that a bus is speeding toward a busy intersection and then one dude with a wad of cash sticking out of his pocket in an envelope with a return address labeled "United Ambulance Drivers Union" says, "hey, I don't see a bus!" are you going to respond "well I guess there's no consensus" and happily meander out into traffic?

Gold Member

When you use language like "quackumentary" and "Jowls Gore", your argument is just name-calling and not well-reasoned persuasion.

You've cited only a single source -- the conservative National Review -- and even then, you picked and chose which parts of the article to quote. The National Review article goes on to state, "[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][SIZE=-1]The IPCC estimates seas globally will rise somewhere between 7 and 23 inches by the next 100 years."

I encourage people to dig even deeper: Why does the National Review choose to use the IPCC report, and not those of other scientific inquiries into Global Warming? Because IPCC is one of the few sources that shares National Review's bias. Wikipedia says about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: (emphasis mine)

[/SIZE][/FONT]

Wikipedia said:

Other critics have pointed to conservative biases and influences over IPCC which suggest that IPCC, far from being prone to exaggerations, is actually more prone to underestimating dangers, under-stating risks, and reporting only the "lowest common denominator" findings which make it through the bureaucracy. These sort of problems are almost inevitable with such a large organisation representing such a large number of bodies with differing postitions. There is an enormous amount of careful negotiation on the content of the text.

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Wikipedia isn't the only organization to report that IPCC's findings are too optimistic: The BBC reports this finding from the peer-reviewed journal Science: (again, emphasis mine)

BBC said:

But a study published on the eve of the IPCC report suggested that the international body's previous reports may have actually been too conservative.

The paper compared the 2001 projections on temperature and sea level change report with what has actually happened.

The models had forecasted a temperature rise between about 0.15C-0.35C (0.27-0.63F) over this period. The actual rise of 0.33C (0.59F) was very close to the top of the IPCC's range.

A more dramatic picture emerged from the sea level comparison. The actual average level, measured by tide gauges and satellites, had risen faster than the intergovernmental panel of scientists predicted it would.

So because, whilst wildly grabbing at anything we possibly can that smells like it MIGHT just MAYBE lend some shred of scientific support (in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary) to the Republican agenda of raping the environment while greasing the palms of their corporate masters-- this means that we should not try to take any precautions at all and maybe Florida will exist in a hundred years and maybe it won't... ::shrug:: nothing to worry about! The next time 300 trained traffic engineers tell you that a bus is speeding toward a busy intersection and then one dude with a wad of cash sticking out of his pocket in an envelope with a return address labeled "United Ambulance Drivers Union" says, "hey, I don't see a bus!" are you going to respond "well I guess there's no consensus" and happily meander out into traffic?

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corporate masters...Republicans rapingtthe environment...Florida might not exist ..any other dopey Daily Kos or Bartcop buzzwords you wanna work in there??

Who says there's nothing to worry about?
Human influence could very well have a dramatic impact on the climate. Could be for the better , could be for the worse. < no alarmists will EVER mention the positive effects of GW. NEVER> .

At this point the debate has sadly been dominated by individuals with a lw POLTICAL view and , as you would expect in that case, the science has been found to be faulty on several occasions. Can you say hockey stick fraud?
Public policy should be based on sound rationale.
Not people who go around squawking " Florida might not exist in 100 years" .
Yeesh.
160 Iq -yeah sure. Sure you weren't reading that upside down?

Gold Member

JQ: I've made my point: The predictions in IPCC's 2001 report have been proven wrong. Unless you're trying to claim that the sea levels rose because the oceans are biased, you can't fault the writers of the Science article.

Gold Member

The Hockey stick controversy is a dispute over the reconstructed estimates of Northern Hemisphere mean temperature changes over the past millennium, especially the particular reconstruction of Mann, Bradley and Hughes, frequently referred to as the MBH98 reconstruction. The term "hockey stick" was coined by the head of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Jerry Mahlman, to describe the pattern.

At the request of the U.S. Congress, a special "Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Past 2,000 Years" was assembled by the National Research Council's Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate. The Committee, consisting of 12 scientists from different disciplines, published its report in 2006. The report agreed that there were statistical shortcomings in the MBH analysis, but concluded that they were small in effect.

More recently, the National Academy of Sciences considered the matter. On June 22, 2006, the academy released a pre-publication version of its report Report-Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, supporting Mann's more general assertion regarding the last decades of the Twentieth Century, but showing less confidence in his assertions regarding individual decades or years, due to the greater uncertainty at that level of precision. "The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence..."

The statistically significant reconstruction skill in the Mann et al. reconstruction is independently supported in the peer-reviewed literature by Huybers (2005) and Wahl and Ammann (2006).

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There is one primary published report that is critical of the Mann findings:

On February 12, 2005, the Geophysical Research Letters paper by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick claimed various errors in the methodology of Mann et al. (1998), claiming that the "Hockey Stick" shape was a result an invalid principal component method. They claimed that using the same steps as Mann et al., they were able to obtain a hockey stick shape as the first PC in 99 percent of cases even if red noise was used as input.

McIntyre and McKitrick's paper has been reinforced by a team of statisticians led by Edward Wegman, chair of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics. The Wegman team was assembled at the request of U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, an outspoken global warming skeptic.

The Wegman report has itself been criticized for a number of things:

The report was not subject to formal peer review.

The result of fixing the alleged errors in the overall reconstruction does not change the general shape of the reconstruction.

Similarly, studies that use completely different methodologies also yield very similar reconstructions.

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif][SIZE=-1]After a 10-year study in and around the Bay of Bengal, oceanographers say the sea is rising at 3.14 millimetres a year in the Sunderbans against a global average of 2 mm, threatening low-lying areas of India and Bangladesh.[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif][SIZE=-1][/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif][SIZE=-1] "At least 15 islands have been affected but erosion is widespread in other islands as well," said Sugato Hazra, an oceanographer at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal.[/SIZE][/FONT]

Gold Member

Jeremy Rifkin was miles ahead of Gore about this stuff. In 1980 he co-authored a book called Entropy: A New World View in which he postulated perfectly plausible reason upon reason why we as a species were ever more rapidly destroying our own habitat. I bought in. Completely (I was quite the liberal idealist about some stuff back in the day).

Problem is he was all wrong. In his predictions of doom and gloom he left out one very important variable - human ingenuity.

So I'm a little more skeptical of the chicken littles this time around.

Heck, if it gets warmer, doesn't that mean more evaporation? So why isn't the planet more humid?

Y'know what? When there are "clean" nuclear weapons (bad for the enemy, good for the environment), the pimp-ass F22 runs on Hydronge fuels and the M1 abrams uses a battery to get around, I may be more convinced that people care.